ITV Renames Online VoD To ITV Player, Prepares For Life After Kangaroo

Britain's biggest commercial broadcaster ITV will rename its online video on demand service from "Catch-up TV" to a more catchy name "ITV player" to make it more memorable, à la BBC iPlayer.

The service was launched back in 2007 and shows ITV's most popular programmes on ITV's website and will get its name changed one week before Boxing day, as part of a drive to make it popular (and catch up with BBC's iPlayer).

Ben McOwen Wilson, director of online at ITV, said, "The new logo is part of our aim to create a recognisable and consistent brand for video-on-demand content across the web and TV".

"It's part of our overall ambition to make our content as widely available for audiences through whichever platform suits them best."

This week has been particularly busy in the online Video on demand market. BBC announced that the iPlayer has had nearly 300 million programme views over the last year and Sky released a paid-for video on demand service.

The renaming of "Catch Up TV" comes a couple of days after the Competition Commission said that Kangaroo, the joint venture between BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4, was too big of a threat to competing online video on demand services to be allowed to evolve in its current format.

And ITV quick to recognise the success of online video on demand as it witnessed a thirty-three fold rise in the average number of requests since it launched.